Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...

spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with

John Perry Barlow John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the ...

and

John Gilmore John Gilmore may refer to: * John Gilmore (activist) (born 1955), co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions * John Gilmore (musician) (1931–1995), American jazz saxophonist * John Gilmore (representative) (1780–1845), ...

, he co-founded the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

, creator of the open source web browser

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Klein to help underrepresented scholars hone their

STEM Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...

knowledge while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.

Early life and education

Kapor was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, and raised in

Freeport, New York Freeport is a village in the town of Hempstead, in Nassau County, on the South Shore of Long Island, in New York state. The population was 43,713 at the 2010 census, making it the second largest village in New York by population. A settlemen ...

on Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from

Yale College Yale College is the undergraduate college of Yale University. Founded in 1701, it is the original school of the university. Although other Yale schools were founded as early as 1810, all of Yale was officially known as Yale College until 1887, ...

in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science in an interdisciplinary major, also attending the Boston-based Beacon College, which had a satellite campus in Washington, D.C. at the time. He began but did not complete a master's degree at the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

but later served on the faculty of the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

and the

University of California, Berkeley School of Information The University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, also known as the UC Berkeley School of Information or the I School, is a graduate school and, created in 1994, the newest of the schools at the University of California, Berkele ...

Career

Lotus

Kapor and his business partner

Jonathan Sachs Jonathan Sachs (born June 25, 1947) is a programmer who co-founded Lotus Development Corporation with Mitch Kapor in 1982 and created the first version of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Sachs left Lotus in 1985 to develop photo-editing ...

founded Lotus in 1982 with backing from Ben Rosen. Lotus' first product was presentation software for the

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at

VisiCorp VisiCorp was an early personal computer software publisher. Its most famous products were Microchess, Visi On and VisiCalc. It was founded in 1976 by Dan Fylstra and Peter R. Jennings as Personal Software, and first published Jennings' Microches ...

, the distributors of the

Visicalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hob ...

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...

, and selling all his rights to VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp. Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released

on January 26, 1983. The name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and

database manager In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

. In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available. Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million in sales. Jerome Want says: :Under founder and CEO Mitch Kapor, Lotus was a company with few rules and fewer internal bureaucratic barriers.... Kapor decided that he was no longer suited to running a company, and n 1986he replaced himself with

Jim Manzi Jim Manzi (born 1951) is the former chairman, president and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and is currently a private investor in various technology start-up ventures. Early career Manzi received his B.A. in Classics from Colgate Univers ...

Digital rights activism

Kapor was extensively involved in initiatives that created the modern Internet. He co-founded the

in 1990 and served as its chairman until 1994. EFF defends civil liberties in the digital world and works to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as the use of technology grows. Kapor attended the first

Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

in 2005.

Investments

Kapor was the founding investor in

UUNET UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Today, UUNET is an internal brand ...

, one of the first, and the largest among, early Internet service providers; of

Real Networks RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of artificial intelligence and computer vision based products. RealNetworks was a pioneer in Internet streaming software and services. They are based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The company also p ...

, the Internet's first streaming media company; and of

Linden Lab Linden Research, Inc., doing business as Linden Lab, is an American technology company that is best known as the creator of ''Second Life''. The company's head office is in San Francisco, with additional offices in Boston, Seattle, Virginia an ...

, maker of the first successful virtual world,

Second Life ''Second Life'' is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Fra ...

. He was also founding chair of the

Commercial Internet eXchange The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was an early interexchange point that allowed the free exchange of TCP/IP traffic, including commercial traffic, between ISPs. It was an important initial effort toward creating the commercial Internet that w ...

(CIX). In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the

, creator of the open source web browser

. Kapor serves on the advisory board of the

Sunlight Foundation The Sunlight Foundation was an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocated for open government. The organization was founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States ...

. In May 2009, after founder Susan P. Crawford had joined the Obama administration, Kapor took over chairmanship of

OneWebDay OneWebDay is an annual day of Internet celebration and awareness held on September 22. The stated goal of founder Susan P. Crawford is for OneWebDay to foster and make visible a global constituency that cares about the future of the Internet. Hi ...

- the "Earth Day for the internet". In 1996, the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

named him a Museum Fellow "for his development of Lotus 1-2-3, the first major software application for the IBM PC". He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health. As an active

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...

, Kapor participated in the initial rounds of

Dropcam Dropcam, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company is known for its Wi-Fi video streaming cameras, Dropcam and Dropcam Pro, that allow people to view live feeds through Dropcam’s cloud-based ...

Twilio Twilio () is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using it ...

Asana An asana is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose,Verse 46, chapter II, "Patanjali Yoga sutras" by Swami Prabhavananda, published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math p. 111 and later extended in hatha yoga ...

, Cleanify, and

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...

Kapor Center and Kapor Capital

Kapor founded the Kapor Center in 2000 as an institution focused on tech inclusion and social impact. The institution's mission is to invest in social and financial capital in vital non-profit organizations. As part of the Kapor Center, Kapor Capital is its venture capital arm. The venture capital firm has been investing since 2011. As of 2018, Kapor Capital has made over 160 investments, primarily in information technology seed stage startups, with a particular focus on diversity. Since 2016, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital, and ''SMASH'' have been located in the Uptown neighborhood of Oakland, CA.

Diversity in technology

In August 2015, Mitch and Freada announced they would invest $40 million over three years to accelerate their work to make the tech ecosystem more inclusive. In addition to his roles at Kapor Capital and Kapor Center, Mitch currently serves on the board o
SMASH
whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace, and sits on the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, a firm whose vision is to embed sustainability into the mainstream capital markets.

Personal life

He is married to

Freada Kapor Klein Freada Kapor Klein (born August 26, 1952) is an American venture capitalist, social policy researcher and philanthropist. As a partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, she is known for efforts to diversify the technolog ...

and resides in

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

and

Healdsburg Healdsburg is a city located in Sonoma County, in California's Wine Country. At the 2010 census, the city had a population of 11,254. Owing to its three most important wine-producing regions (the Russian River, Dry Creek, and Alexander Valle ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Both served on the board of trustees of the

Summer Science Program The Summer Science Program (SSP) is an academic summer program where high school students experience college-level education and do research in celestial mechanics by studying the orbits of asteroids, biochemistry by studying the kinetic propertie ...

from 2004 to 2006. He was a student of the program in 1966.

Awards and honors

*1985 – Golden Plate Award of the

American Academy of Achievement The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet o ...

*2003 – Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Norbert Wiener Award *2005 –

EFF Pioneer Award The EFF Pioneer Award is an annual prize by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for people who have made significant contributions to the empowerment of individuals in using computers. Until 1998 it was presented at a ceremony in Washington, ...

*2010 – REDF Inno+prise Award *2015 – Ford Legacy Award *2018 – Elon University Medal for Entrepreneurial Leadership

References

External links

Mitch Kapor's weblog archives

Mitch Kapor's "Why Wikipedia Is the Next Big Thing"

Wikimania 2006 bio

"How to Build a Successful Company"
Kapor speaking at Stanford (podcast & video)
Kapor Center For Social Impact

Kapor Capital
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kapor, Mitch 1950 births Living people People from Brooklyn People from Freeport, New York Businesspeople from San Francisco People from Healdsburg, California Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Yale College alumni MIT Sloan School of Management alumni American computer businesspeople 20th-century American Jews Second Life Internet activists Electronic Frontier Foundation people Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board members Mozilla people Summer Science Program American bloggers American technology company founders American chairpersons of corporations Open source advocates 21st-century American Jews